Category Archives: Software

How to Make a Bootable MacOS Mojave Thumb Drive

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Thanks to OSXDaily for the detailed write-up.

Download MacOS Mojave from the Mac App Store

Mojave is the latest OSX/macOS to be released from Apple and it has the somewhat minor but much-anticipated Dark Mode along with other substantial features – which I will not delve into but you can read about them on the Apple Mojave page

Items Needed for Install:

  1. USB Drive (16GB or larger)
  2. MacOS Mojave Installer

It’s pretty straightforward but if you happen to be on an unsupported Mac and need to obtain the Mojave installer then there’s a slight challenge – as Mojave will only download from the App Store on compatible devices.

For unsupported Macs go to dosdude’s Mojave page and download his macOS Mojave Patcher – this will let you download the Mojave installer directly to your system.

Run the .dmg file (you may have to tweak your Security settings to allow the app to run) and tell it where to save the installer file.  You can then use the patcher tool to create your Mojave Boot Drive.

mojavepatcher.png

 

 

 

2019.02.04 Update

  • Just got this working very well on a late-2009 iMac 27″ (Mac 10,1) which was running High Sierra until the other night. At first I got a bunch of failed boots when the Mac didn’t see any kind of boot device available. Once I ran the (included) Post-Install Utility (duh!) to patch all the leftover tidbits the Mac boots up fine! I’m now running a dark-mode Mojave iMac! woot woot!

Smallpdf – Compress, Merge, and Split PDFs Online

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If you’re like me you work with a LOT of documents in both soft and hard copy. Although the world is becoming more and more paperless some of us still have to deal with hard copy documents which need to be (e)signed, manipulated, and scanned back into different electronic distribution systems – email, contract systems, etc.

Working with PDFs, although a great format, gets pretty messy quickly.

I have used PDFSplit! many many times as it lets you break up large PDFs into smaller files – imagine you scanned a dozen documents into one PDF file and wanted to process it all later – that would be the best use case for PDFSplit!

I just came upon a situation where I scanned a series of consecutive docs but needed to reorder them. This is where I found Smallpdf – another great online PDF tool which allows you to do the following:

  • Compress
  • JPG to PDF
  • PDF to JPG
  • Merge PDF – you can view in Page Mode and rearrange pages
  • Split PDF
  • Word, Excel, and Powerpoint to PDF

Basically you drag and drop a PDF file into the web app and begin manipulating from there.  There is a File Mode and a Page Mode.  Page Mode allows you to visually reorder pages which is very convenient.

If security is a concern Smallpdf states that the files you upload are kept on their servers for only an hour and no backups are made so that’s some good reassurance.

Five Best Desktop Video Players

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Here’s a Lifehacker article on their opinion of the Five Best Desktop Video Players.

For the most part I’ve always avoided Windows Media Player and gone straight to VLC since it’s very lightweight and quick to start up lacking all the overhead of other media players. Plus Windows Media Player only works on the bulk of my video files (I primarily have .mkv files) after I install VLC, which adds the proper codecs.

I’ve used VLC on Mac and Windows and have had nothing but good results.

How to Link to a Specific Paragraph or Slide in a Google Document

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Here’s a great tip for users of Google docs (aka: Google Drive now that everything’s integrated into the Drive application)

Instead of sending someone a link to your entire document you can send a link directly to a specific section of your document.

Lifehacker Article – Also has the process to link to a specific slide in Google Presentation

Abridged Process for Google Docs:

  1. Go to the section to which you want to link
  2. Click Insert > Bookmark
  3. Right-click Link and copy it to your clipboard
  4. Email it to your audience